About
Hello and welcome to alphaheart.com – the official website of The Alphabet of the Human Heart.
Dear Reader,
We hope you enjoyed The Alphabet of the Human Heart as much as we loved making it.
It was privilege to be able to share the experience of writing and illustrating this journey from A to Zen.
We’ve written it with all our hearts in the hope that it will help at least one person out there in the emotional wilderness. If it does so then it was worth all the blood, sweat and international phone calls.
We’ve been friends for more than 30 years. Along the way we’ve experienced both sides of life – the upside and the downside – and we’ve tried to bring our experiences and the lessons we’ve learned together into one book.
We hope that our modest alphabet brings peace and happiness to whoever picks it up, wherever they are at, at whatever stage of life they have reached.
We thank you for your interest and sincerely hope that you continue to enjoy exploring the alphabet of your own human heart…
L is for love,
Matthew and James
PS – This website is currently super simple. We hope that over time it will become more robust in content. So keep coming back!
PPS – Please leave your thoughts. Happy. Sad. Whatever you want to say, say it here.
PPPS – If you’re looking at the Outtakes section you can click on the images to enlarge.
Cover for the Upside
Cover for the Downside
INTRO
Alphabetter.
There are more than 100 standard alphabets in the world. English’s own 26-letter ‘Latin’ version, for instance, has over 59 versions on its own, including Azerbaijani, Beghilos and Catalan.
The world’s shortest alphabet, the Rotokas, has only twelve letters, while the Hindi alphabet, if you include the symbols of Sanskrit, has 58 characters, including one that is purely theoretical.
Braille is an alphabet, as is Pitman Shorthand, as is Moon Type and Morse Code. Then there are the fictional alphabets – Klingon, from the planet Star Trek, Annabesh from Star Wars, and Tengwar, from Middle-earth.
Whichever way we look at the world, there is an alphabet to help us describe it. They help us navigate the environmental we live in, understand it a little bit more, better explain it to our children and our friends and to ourselves.
The Alphabet of the Human Heart
A handbook for the happy, and a bible for the broken hearted, The Alphabet of the Human Heart is an enchanting and enriching journey through the upside and the downside of what it means to be human – our hopes and fears, our strengths and our weaknesses, our highs and our lows.
It is an A to Zen of how we feel: our pleasures and pain, our loves and losses, our sadness and our joys.
“We hope that it might help describe something of the extraordinary experience of being alive. We hope it might help people achieve a more resourceful state: happier, wiser, calmer, more productive, more loving. And we hope that it might spark a moment of realisation that we are, all of us, most definitely not alone. We also hope it might make a good present for someone you love.”
Mathew Johnstone and James Kerr
Alphabet of the Human Heart is published by Pan MacMillan Australia 2009.
About the Authors
This is us trying our best to look author-ish.
Matthew met James when they were allocated lockers together on their first day at a new school. They’ve been friends ever since. Between them, they’ve had more than their fair share of ups and downs, and they’ve turned their experience of life – and of friendship – into a book that combines words and pictures to tell a bigger story. To complete it they worked remotely – by phone and email between London and Sydney – and also face-to-face, in a freezing stone cottage in the Cotswolds. Together they’ve crafted a beautiful and intimate book, visual and verbal, funny and profound, a book to treasure.
Matthew Johnstone:
The Alphabet of the Human Heart is Matthew Johnstone’s 4th book. In 1998 he wrote and illustrated What’s the Story? published by Stuart Tabori and Chang New York with a foreword by Edward De Bono.
In 2005 Matthew wrote and illustrated I Had a Black Dog, an illustrated book on what it is to suffer depression and what can be learnt from it. I Had a Black Dog is now published in 13 countries.
In 2008, with his wife Ainsley, he published the sequel Living With a Black Dog, a guide to those who care for people living with depression. This made the top 10 best selling books in the UK in February 2009.
Both the Black Dog books were published by Pan MacMillan Australia.
Matthew Johnstone had 15 years + as a creative in advertising where he worked in Sydney, San Francisco and New York. He worked for some of the best agencies around the world and won many industry awards.
As a result of the success of the Black Dog books Matthew now works as a creative consultant at the Black Dog Institute developing various creative programs on happiness, resilience and understanding mood disorders for schools and the work place. For more info go to www.blackdoginstitute.org.au
He also delivers talks to community groups, schools, corporations and farmers. He has talked extensively all over Australia and the UK.
When he’s not working for the Institute he is an author, illustrator, husband and father of two.
He lives happily in Sydney Australia.
James Kerr:
The Alphabet of the Human Heart is James Kerr’s second book. Twenty Eight Heroes, his first, was an Australian bestseller.
A writer, filmmaker, photographer and creative director, James is the founder of Chalk Projects, a London-based Creative Consultancy. He has won creative awards around the world.
His film work has been shown on the BBC, Channel Four and PBS. In 2003 James founded Teenage Kicks, a ‘five a side for the future’ football tournament now in its ninth year.
He has written for The Independent, the Guardian and the Times.
He is happily and recently married to Holly, with a baby due any moment.
He lives in London, England.
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